"I enjoyed not being at airports" - Daniel Ricciardo explains the struggles of F1's calendar

McLaren driver Daniel Ricciardo recently explained how the pandemic gave him a subtle taste of life outside of F1, after spending three months in his homeland.

Of course, the Australian eventually missed being away from the sport and preferred an active career trotting the globe and doing what he loves most.

Speaking to Ariel Helwani in an online interview, Daniel Ricciardo said:

“There was a part of me which loved it, and really enjoyed just being in one place for a period of time. We all do a 100 flights a year. As you see its not domestic, its international and its from one end of the globe to the other. So it is tiring and I enjoyed not being at airports.”

The McLaren driver, who was at his farm in Perth for three months during the pandemic, enjoyed the feeling of being away from the sport for the first month or two. However, the Australian expressed how he ultimately started to miss F1 towards the end of the pandemic break.

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Daniel Ricciardo discusses life on break, schedule struggles, and his opinion on retiring

Stating reasons on why retirement is not on his agenda, Daniel Ricciardo said,

“So probably for the first month or two I actually liked that thought but then I really started to miss it. I missed the intensity, the energy, all the kind of pressure that comes with it as well. It was also an outside clarification that any thought of retirement wasn’t on my plan yet.”

Meanwhile, the former Red Bull Racing and Renault driver also agreed that he got a taste of what retirement felt like during the lockdown. Although he loved the break it offered, it's clearly not on his agenda to stay in relax-mode forever quite yet.

As the F1 circuit lands in Brazil for the second round of the overseas triple header on the calendar, there have been several other drivers expressing similar opinions on the brutality of long F1 calendars and the much dreaded triple headers.